DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMAj^ ISAIAH BOWMAN ♦{!♦ ■ AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY / SPECIAL PUBLICATION JSO, 5 i«^ilSi, university of Connecticut libraries hbl, stx F 3131.B78 Desert trails of Atacama, 3151 B78 THE OASIS OF MAXILLA The first and last impression of the desert towns is enduringly pleasant. From the desert trail, long, hot, and deep in dust, their inviting gardens are seen many leagues away, and at night a tower light on a commanding hill- top guides the traveler to their hospitable gates. Rows of refreshing orchard trees, neat squares of vegetable gardens, and a life-giving stream with cluster- ing houses — that is the picture. In the twilight of morning and evening the strong contrast of yellow plain and deep green foliage is most marked and lends to the view, in that otherwise cheerless land, an indescribable charm. AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY SPECIAL PUBLICATION NO. 5 Edited by G. M. Wrigley DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA BY ISAIAH BOWMAN Director of the American Geographical Society AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY BROADWAY AT 156th STREET NEW YORK 19 24 COPYRIGHT, 1924 BY THE AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK RUMFORD PRESS, CONCORD, N. H., U.S.A. CONTENTS I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII Pioneer Fields of Discovery i A Desert Journey ii Rainfall of the Desert 40 Population Groups of the Nitrate Desert . . 60 Political Geography of Atacama 83 The Southern Margin of the Desert .... 96 Earthquakes in Copiapo and the Roaring Moun- tain OF Toledo 143 The Influence of Mining on a Desert Settle- ment 162 Eastern Border Towns 186 The Smaller Intermont Valleys: The Live Stock Trade with Bolivia 202 The Chaco Country and the Cattle Trade with THE Nitrate Desert 218 San Pedro de Atacama 236 The Puna de Atacama: Land Forms, Pasture, and Woodland 252 Crossing the Puna de Atacama 275 Puna Settlements 294 Habitability OF the Puna IN THE Past . . . 310 The Geographical Significance of the Puna . 328 The Historical Bearing 343 Index 349 separate illustrations I The Copiapo and Vallenar Valleys (3 photographs) opp. no II Border of the Cordillera at Rosario de Lerma (2 maps) opp. 192 III The Puna de Atacama (3 photographs) .... opp. 278 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from LYRASIS members and Sloan Foundation http://www.archive.org/details/deserttrailsofatOObowm PREFACE I have attempted herein to describe and interpret a region, traversed on three field expeditions, which has more strongly attracted me than any other part of South America — the Desert of Atacama and the high ranges and plateaus of the Central Andes which end in the Puna de Atacama on the south. The narrative is brief, personal experiences being introduced, as a rule, only when they serve to complete the geographical picture. Near the southern end of the desert are the towns of Copiapo and Vallenar, and the longest chapter is devoted to their fascinating life and especially its pioneer character. Of equal interest to the geographer is the girdle of settled country that runs about the high and cold Puna de Atacama. I have not limited the story to the desert country alone but have included a brief account of the Chaco or grass- lands of northeastern Argentina and adjacent Bolivia, because the currents of business flow naturally from these border settle- ments across the Atacama country and deeply affect its life. My grateful acknowledgments are due the Editor, Miss Gladys M. Wrigley, who has performed her task in so con- structive a manner as quite to transcend the usual editorial function, supplying many historical data, especially in the chapter on mining, and giving the whole work logical arrange- ment and precision. I am also indebted to Miss Elizabeth T. Piatt for her scholarly assistance in assembling reference material; and to Lt.-Col. Michael Kostenko, who in his craftsmanlike compilation of the Iquique, Atacama, and Coquimbo sheets of the American Geographical Society's Millionth Map of Hispanic America has supplied a most help- ful basis for geographical research in the Atacama region. It is a pleasure to record my obligations to Yale University under whose auspices two of the field expeditions were carried through. To the Officers and Council of the Society I desire to express my heartfelt thanks and appreciation for their support of field work in South America and their interest in this as well as my earlier and more technical publications on the region. Isaiah Bowman CHAPTER I PIONEER FIELDS OF DISCOVERY The geographical explorer seeks not merely new or wonderful things; indeed his main object is not that at all. If he steers a course to distant lands it is because he wishes first of all to make discoveries, whether these are wonderful or not, out be- yond the realm of accustomed life, or as Colonel Roosevelt put it, "beyond the rim of the known world." Real exploration can also be done in one's own garden, as Darwin demonstrated in his classic study of earthworms. Agassiz, walking over the rounded New England hills and drift-strewn valleys, discov- ered the fact of continental glaciation in a vanished Ice Age, where others still speculated about the Noaic deluge. He said simply, "If this were in Switzerland I should say the ice had been here." Before he came to New England he had "ex- plored" the fish collections of Cuvier at Paris. Whatever he did was noteworthy because it was related to the discovery or exploration of a moving idea. The adventure and sport of ex- ploration are but a fleeting record compared with contributions to knowledge, for they are the incidents on the way and not the goal of exploratory research. It has become the fashion to say that major exploration is at an end because the North Pole and the South Pole have been attained and the general design of the mountains, deserts, and drainage systems of the earth has become known. Yet in truth the map is still crowded with scientific mysteries though its great historic mysteries have been swept away. The Mountains of the Moon, the sources of the Nile and the Congo, the secrets of the inner Sahara, the heart of Tibet, these are among the great mysteries that long awaited the explorer and that have been dispelled one by one. Has the age of discovery ended with these exploits? Before we can answer that question we must know what constitutes a discovery. It is undoubtedly an achievement to fill in a blank 2 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA space on the map ; but discovery has not ended when the blank spaces are filled, for, after all, the map is but a sheet of paper upon which we place symbols and lines that stand for realities and their surface arrangement, such as a river or a mountain or a city; and it is the character of the mountain, the peculiarities of the river, the conditions of life and the relations of the people who live in the cities, or in fields on the plains, or along river banks and in mountain valleys, and who transport, manufac- ture, and perhaps have political relations and boundaries, ports, colonies, and the like, that are of abiding interest. The stage upon which humanity plays the great game of life is an important thing, but the play is much more important. Dis- covery can hardly be said to be ended until we have studied every people in the world in its peculiar physical setting, made nations known to one another, and perchance lessened our troubles by revealing us to ourselves. Long before the sources of the Nile were discovered by European explorers there were people living about the headwaters of the Nile. Indians had roamed the forests of the Rio Roosevelt for centuries before the discovery in 191 3 of that thousand-mile river in the heart of the Amazon country. The Quechua and Aymara Indians of the Central Andes have passed almost daily in and out of the ruins of buildings that their ancestors constructed centuries ago but of whose existence we were unaware until the present genera- tion. Until facts like these have been discovered and their ex- act character made known through published records, they are the exclusive possession of merely primitive peoples. They have not yet been discovered by science. It is in this sense that the geographer undertakes the study of new lands and regions today. For him the world is far from being explored. Until a few decades ago we had almost no accurate scientific information about the distinctive conditions of life in South America, or about the distribution and charac- ter of people who found it difficult either to achieve or to keep a national unity. Until two decades ago the physiography of the great Andean chain was almost completely unknown. We were aware of the length and breadth of the mountains, the sources of the most important rivers, the heights of passes and PIONEER FIELDS OF DISCOVERY 3 peaks, but we knew nothing of the exact nature and history of the mountain forms. No one had up to that time given us a picture of the mountain landscapes in modern terms; that is, in terms that conveyed exact impressions and in contrast to the vague, general terms such as the casual traveler may employ in painting a picture that makes a special appeal to him. The Five Main Fields of Exploration The desert has furnished one of the five main fields of explor- ation in historical times, the other four being the polar regions, the unknown mountains of the world, the tropical forests, and the islands of the sea. Mountains were once objects of venera- tion and awe and even of worship. Many peoples considered them the abode of evil spirits. Their dark defiles, their great uninhabited spaces, their wild storms, all of which have excited the imagination and attracted the explorer in modern times, were fearsome things to the plains dweller who knew the mountains only by reputation or by legends that came down to lowland cities from mountain folk or from passing travelers. Where the modern man goes voyaging for adventure and pleas- ure among distant and little-known islands in remote parts of the sea, there the European at the dawn of civilization saw only outer darkness or the abode of strange peoples and listened to legends of islands that were said to have vanished beneath the ocean. Equally strange as distant islands, equally fearsome as the mountains, were the vast inner recesses of the tropical forests when their margins first became known to the explorer and the settler. The sources of the great rivers that flowed through them were in most cases unknown, and quite unknown at first were the peoples who lived on their banks or in clearings in the forest. For a long time it was believed that the Amazon forest was the home of the strange folk that legend had pic- tured, and one expedition after the other went out to find them. The extraordinary animal and human life of the central African forest long furnished one of the greatest incentives to explora- tion, an incentive that draws men even today. The conquest of the poles of the earth, like the conquest of high mountain 4 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA peaks, has had In it a large element of science and the search for knowledge but also an equally large element of sheer adventure and sport, for It has required physically well-trained men, willing to adopt special modes of living and special diets, and also men of Imagination who could work long and arduously for the sake of a record. It Is no dispraise of the scientific re- sults of explorers to say that the appeal of exploration In many cases has been to the romantic and adventurous rather than the strictly scientific, though the name of science Is always in- voked to strengthen each new enterprise. Peary put the case more frankly. He thought the attainment of the North Pole by an American a matter of patriotic pride and that the way to get there was to live like the Eskimo, have exceptional powers of endurance, and expend unlimited muscular energy. It Is altogether a modern thing to look at the great objects of exploration from the purely scientific standpoint. David and Mawson In the Antarctic and Stefansson in his Arctic work of the past decade have done this. It was characteristic of Colo- nel Roosevelt that he should never be carried away by his nar- rative, or the adventure which he was living, to such an extent as to overlook the scientific value of the thing he was observ- ing. Everything that he wrote bears the stamp of the pioneer spirit. He was curious about the pioneer. He wanted to see how he lived, how he met the special conditions of his environ- ment, whether of frost or heat or flood or drought; and, above all, he was keen about the motives that lay back of that restless energy which the pioneer has always displayed and that Independence of spirit that has made him so great a factor in history. Both his African and South American journeys have yielded notable pioneer studies, and his observations on west- ern life and especially his historical studies In the "Winning of the West" are contributions of a high order. Livingstone was for a long time almost alone In having an unquenchable inter- est in the frontier of modern life In Africa and the effect of the oncoming wave of civilization upon the native peoples whom he knew and loved. That is why his writings will have a classic interest long after the romantic and adventurous work of others shall have passed Into comparative forgetfulness. PIONEER FIELDS OF DISCOVERY 5 To my mind, the desert is the most interesting place in the world for exploration and geographical study. This is alto- gether a matter of personal taste and to that extent at least will not require an explanation. Far from being uninhabited, every desert has a great many people in it and a great many more who live just on its borders, where they are grouped in com- munities that trade with the larger cities and towns of the wet- ter regions near by and the still smaller cities and towns of the desert interior. They take great risks with the rain. Now they have years of plenty, and again they have years of drought and distress. How came a desert people to seek so severe an envi- ronment? So long as the well-watered lands will support more population, why do some go into — or remain in — the desert? There has been estimated to be many millions of people living in the deserts of the world, the Sahara alone supporting two millions within its borders. Of the fifty million square miles of land surface on the earth one fifth, or ten million square miles, are desert. It may seem sur- prising that anyone should endure the risk and distress of desert living until we remember that desert folk are not scat- tered over bare rock and lifeless sand but live grouped in oases for the most part, where their gardens look as prosper- ous as those of Connecticut or Virginia. Just as mountain people live in valleys among the mountains and not on moun- tain peaks so desert people live in the watered spots and not on the sand dunes. Though we hear much of the nomadism of the desert, there are far more desert dwellers living on farms than there are living from wide-ranging flocks and herds. And even the nomad generally winters or summers, according to the quality and time of the rains, in some home site where for a time at least he leads a more settled life. The Desert as a Geographical Laboratory Any land that has severe conditions of life is a geographical laboratory. If men there take risks with nature they can sur- vive only by adapting their life accordingly. Again, every des- ert settlement tends to fill up. When a desert valley has been 6 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA filled with people by the natural growth of population or by immigration from elsewhere, what is the mode of escape? Neighboring valleys and oases are often themselves filled up, and the horizon of a humble farmer or shepherd rarely includes the distant and strange places that are the centers of industry, where population can be absorbed in increasing numbers. In such a small isolated world what changes of social structure are brought about by the pressure of population? These little des- ert communities are to a large degree self-governing. To what extent have they adapted their home-made regulations to meet the trials of the years of drought? When the rains fail and the cattle die and trade becomes dislocated and feeble, how is the social and business structure maintained? It is natural to look to war as a relief from the pressure of population. But, as a matter of fact, war offers very little re- lief from such pressure. The feuds and raids that exist among many desert folk involve a certain percentage of loss by vio- lent death. Hard conditions of life themselves tend to hold the population down by limiting the birth rate in one way or another. Great changes of climate may bring about a general movement of population, and we have seen this illustrated by the sharp droughts of the past few years in the Samara region north and northwest of the Caspian Sea, when hordes of Russians moved west and north into the more favored sections in their search for food. But while such a driving forth of a desert people may have been brought about, I think the effect of it upon history and the social structure has been altogether exaggerated, perhaps largely because it is a picturesque and violent proceeding that appeals to the imagination. But a picturesque event is oftentimes utterly trivial in its effect upon the character of a people and its modes of gaining a livelihood. If history is a record of picturesque incidents, then the driving forth of a desert people by increasing drought is an important fact. If, on the other hand, history is a record of the growth of culture and ideas, then a given migration from a drought-stricken desert may have very little significance. The fact that a people has gone forth is in itself not to be taken as establishing the importance of the event. If it goes steadily PIONEER FIELDS OF DISCOVERY 7 forth and carries a significant culture into bordering commu- nities or is itself absorbed by bordering communities that are altered in the process, then the migration is of very great im- portance. I think we have too long assumed that the mere movement of peoples is the important thing, whereas the truth would appear to lie at the opposite extreme. If the effect of the migration is important, then the migration is important; but it must be first shown that there has been an effect. Whether or not migrations have affected the life of a desert people, that life tends to go on living up to the limit of its known resources and to use them with all the intelligence at its command ; so that those who stay in desert valleys and oases live a self-contained life. Is Man the Conqueror or the Conquered? On the western, or seaward, border of the great Andean chain the desert holds sway for nearly two thousand miles. Down into the border of the desert come streams from the higher country where snows and summer rains give birth to a multitude of mountain torrents. The villages and tiny settle- ments lie scattered along the foot of the Andes. Each commu- nity lives a life unto Itself. Isolation is here an outstanding fact, traffic with the outside world being both feeble and Irreg- ular. All the settlements exhibit social and political organiza- tions shaped by the geographical conditions that surround them. They are locally famous for this product or that and, though far away from the great centers of commerce, are not wholly unaffected by modern civilization. We are not to imag- ine because a railroad has been built near by or a mine has been opened calling for such labor as the desert can spare, that a desert community has been revolutionized. Even in such cases nature continues to stamp her character upon the life of the desert dweller. I wish to emphasize this point because it is cus- tomary to say when man has built a railroad into the desert or the mountains that he has conquered them, that thereby man is bending nature to his will, that he is annihilating what for- merly frustrated him. But even if railroads are run across the 8 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA mountains or the desert reclaimed by scientific methods of in- vestigation or rubber gathered, as it was until recently, in enor- mous quantities in all the highways and byways of a once im- penetrable forest, still all these are done by such methods and at such an expense of human energy and of capital, even of life, as to make them examples not of sheer human conquest but of a conditional conquest. Because of the urgency of his need, man in the temperate zones penetrates the unfavorable envi- ronment of desert and tropical forest and meets difficulties by new means, chiefly through the expenditure of money. The railroads that cross the Andes have not overcome the moun- tains; they are paying toll to them. Every pound of coal, every mile of grade that must be overcome, costs man so much the more and reduces the profits of his enterprise or increases the tax upon the resources of all those who contribute to the com- merce which the railroad carries. The historian Buckle was measurably right, therefore, when he entertained the view that the backwardness of South Americans was due to the fact that man was there overbur- dened by nature as upon no other continent. The tropical for- ests are too vast, in Buckle's view, the mountains and plateaus too high, the deserts too arid for man's successful conquest. Now the railroads have come, many great mines have been opened, the population has been vastly increased; but out be- yond the sphere of influence of these things, in the isolated villages of the desert oases, and in lonely mountain valleys are still living unaffected groups that follow the old callings and ways of life. The border of any desert is a long-enduring frontier. Four centuries, and at the end of them a railway, have not altered the essential pioneer quality of the life of desert communities like Calama and Copiapo ; and to an even greater degree this is true of San Pedro de Atacama, Pica, Matilla, and Quillagua. Water remains a primordial basis of life; the state of the pastures is a topic as keenly interesting today as in the time of Valdivia and Aguirre; the mountain trails and the best seasons of passage over them are known to boy and man alike; the year of the last river flood is still the principal date of PIONEER FIELDS OF DISCOVERY 9 reference for events in and about Copiapo and takes preced- ence over earthquakes in this respect, terrible as these have been; the sources of firewood, quarrels over water rights, the price of forage and cart or pack mules, the state of the snows in the Cordillera — one or another is a daily theme of conversation and a running basis of business. The structure of such a community is of great historical as well as geograph- ical interest. Loria, the Italian economist, holds that the history of colonial settlement is for economic science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light primitive stratifi- cations. "America," he says, "has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history."^ 1 Achille Loria: Analisi della proprieta capitalista, 2 vols., Turin, 1889; reference in Vol. 2, p. 15. Quoted by F. J. Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Ann. Rept. Amer. Hist. Assn. for 1893, pp. igQ-227), p. 207. mr\ Fig. I — General location map of the Desert and Puna of Atacama, in northern Chile, north- western Argentina, and southwestern Bolivia. Reduced from the American Geographical So- ciety's six-sheet map of Hispanic America on the scale of i : 6,000,000 with additions from the compilation sheets of the Society's i : 1,000,000 map. The heavy dotted lines represent the prin- cipal trails that supplement the railway network. See Fig. 86, p. 253; and Fig. 87, p. 259. 10 CHAPTER II A DESERT JOURNEY If the high and bold coast of northern Chile excites the imagination in these times, what must it have seemed to the sea voyagers of the sixteenth century, the hulls of whose tiny caravels would find ample room in a single smokestack of either the Leviathan or the Majestic! The so-called ports of northern Chile are either open roadsteads or occupy mere shallow bights in this forbidding coast, and the towns stand upon narrow marine terraces cut in a past age and now up- lifted to form a narrow shelf that furnishes barely room enough for a settlement. In places two or three thousand feet of steep scarp, as barren apparently as if no rain ever fell, shut off all view of the distant mountains. There are no openings here and there where green valleys lie floored with cultivated fields as on the coast of Peru. It is a simpler coast than that farther north and far more desert ic in aspect. The streams disappear for the most part in inland basins, and the coast is almost entirely without a touch of green. Except for one river, the Loa, there is not a single stream that reaches the sea in the 600 miles of territory from Arica to the mouth of the Copiapo River. There are dry arroyos that nick the great western scarp of the coastal desert, but they carry water only in times of highly exceptional rain separated by ten or fifteen and in some cases fifty years of drought. The Desert Landscape There is in northern Chile none of the scenic beauty that marks the change from bleak mountains to the warm, green valleys of the coastal desert of Peru. In the latter case the streams reach the sea, and the valley walls enclose cultivated fields that fill the valley floor. In Peru the picture is generally touched with color — a yellow, haze-covered horizon on the 12 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA bare desert above, brown lava flows on the brink of the valley, gray-brown cliffs, and greens ranging from the dull shade of algarrobo, olive, and fig trees to the brightness of freshly ir- rigated alfalfa meadows. In northern Chile there is no hint of water until one reaches the foothills of the Andes far beyond the Coast Range and across the intervening desert. Where . '"'•qa' ^ii;r-%^-!^M Fig. 2 — The steep coast of northern Chile at the nitrate port of Caleta Buena. A cog railway connects the shore with the upper level which stands at 2000 to 2500 feet above sea level. water occurs it is so small in volume that its effects are almost completely hidden in the depths of steep-walled ravines, so that in many places one may look for miles along the Andes without seeing a single trace of vegetation or human life. To reach the desert of northern Chile from the sea one crosses by passes set almost at the crest of the Coast Range. These appear high up in the ocean view of the coast, but from the desert they are mere notches set in low and quite rounded hills with smooth contours. Beyond, the desert opens out, flat in places or gently rolling in the piedmont belt or broken A DESERT JOURNEY 13 by a cinder cone or local lava flow. The broad plain of the nitrate desert is known as the pampa and is set between two mountain systems. On the eastern horizon the western range of the Andes (in the Iquique region) rises by a broad and rather regular slope to an even crest visible from the passes near the coast; on the west is the Coast Range. On my first pack-train journey into northern Chile where the nitrate desert begins I was delighted to find all my ex- pectations of desert scenery realized. For the first fifty miles there was but a single spot where a natural growth of green could be seen from the trail and but one other where there was any green growth at all, and that beside a desert well about which were clustered a few low huts. All the rest was naked rock and sand, brown and yellow in color yet appearing stark and colorless in tone in the midday sun when the whole land- scape is overlighted; glowing with color as the sun declines and the shadows of the ravines come out. It is the end of the day that brings out the colorful mood of the desert. The afternoon winds raise huge clouds of dust, and, as the sun's rays filter through the murky atmosphere at sunset, they range from lively yellow at the beginning to violet, which in turn deepens gradually to a series of purples that glorify the sky for a short half hour until displaced by the grays that deepen into night. At the eastern edge of the desert there are in places moun- tains of great topographic simplicity, as east of Iquique; while in other places they show great complexity, as where deep canyons bordered by variegated rocks nick the high mountain wall with its crown of volcanoes and wide bordering volcanic flows. The snows of the higher cordillera give the summit, peaks a clearer outline against the dark blue and purple back- ground of the sunset sky in the east. From the mountains the desert plain appears to extend indefinitely westward and to have a much wider range of color and form. Distant and lonely a village stands on a narrow terrace at the canyon border, its green barley and alfalfa fields ending at the edge of an abrupt scarp where the floods of the rainy season and those from the melting snows tear holes in the defensive ram- 14 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA parts that the villagers have built to protect their precious acres from these "acts of God." In the great hollows at the heads of the canyons are natural pastures, and there under the cliffs the traveler finds shelter from the cold down-valley winds of night. Many leagues of dusty and stony trail must be traveled between oases, but there is scarcely a single valley of im- FlG. -Pack train in the desert above Pica in northern Chile. portance that does not have commercial connection with distant places on the other side of the mountains in Bolivia and Argentina. In such a country every wayfarer is immensely interesting. One's route and purpose must become known to all before the flood of questions subsides. The life of the village is turned inside out for you. If there seems to be only abound- ing hospitality it is no derogation of the native's spirit to say that the traveler pays for his hospitality in news. When there is no morning paper to be had the stranger within the gates is a lively substitute. New York seems friendly and romantic only on the rarest occasions and in rare moods, and one of these is when the traveler, returns from the wilderness. He can then appreciate what he himself means to the man in the desert or the distant mountain village when a strange pack train swings into the head of the one tiny street that marks the order of a town. The deserts of the world are not lifeless places, although lifeless tracts of more or less limited extent can be found in A DESERT JOURNEY 15 almost all deserts. In northern Chile where is the driest cli- mate in the world there are villages, because even there the desert is not absolutely rainless, and where there is rain there are streams and settlements beside them. It is the rarest oc- currence to find a watered spot in the desert that has not been settled by man. The Nitrate Pampa For the pack-train journey across Atacama, the desert of northern Chile, I obtained mules and guides at the nitrate plant of Central Lagunas east of Iquique. Through the kind- ness of the British Consul there and of Mr. Watson, the mana- ger of his nitrate works on the pampa, we were prepared for a journey of several weeks and set out early in May for the pass at the southern end of the Cordillera Sillilica, which, between latitude I9°S. and 2i°S., constitutes the boundary between Chile and Bolivia. Our guides were workmen from the nitrate establishment and were supposed to know the mountain trails, but in reality they were as ignorant of them as we were. From the Consul, who had been over a portion of our route, we obtained a description that was of far more value than the knowledge and advice of the guides. The first day's journey, including a short stop in the late afternoon at the pumping sta- tion on the pipe line to the coast, took us to Matilla. Soon after we rode out from the pleasant shade of the station we entered the edge of the piedmont slope formed of mountain detritus washed into place at times of heavy rain or of melting snow in the mountains when the streams come down in tor- rents. Our course for an hour or more was along this slope rather than across it, and in this stretch we saw men digging fuel from the ground and loading it upon wagons from the station — an astonishing way in which to get firewood ! All the more curious is it to hear the phrase "mining for wood." Even at the present day the lenador, or woodcutter, is a typical figure in the desert region, and his searches for the commodity of his trade, as those of the mine prospector, have contributed to the exploration of this inhospitable country. i6 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA Exploitation of Firewood The Pampa del Tamarugal, which runs from the latitude of Pisagua to the River Loa, differs from the desert tracts on either side of it in having more abundant ground water and a higher water table. In the Lagunas salar it is only three and a half feet from the surface. Today the Pampa still retains fragments of what appears to have been a more extensive thorn-woodland cover, characterized by tamarugos, algar- robos, and other drought-resisting species, that is represented on some of the older maps and described in early records. Frezier reports that in 17 12 there was near Calama a forest of algarrobos where vegetation is now almost entirely absent. ^ San Roman saw in the southern Desert of Atacama dead for- ests of algarrobo in the sand. They were dug up for firewood.^ Plagemann notes the existence of algarrobo forests sixty or seventy years ago close to the village of Tarapaca where now is complete desert.^ People of that village supported their troops of sheep by allowing them to eat the fruits of the trees. Much of the wood appears to have been cleared in the latter part of the eighteenth century to aid in a new desert industry, the exploitation of nitrate from Tirana for the local — and illegal — production of gunpowder and also for the reduction of ores.^ The present exploitation of wood at Tarapaca depends chiefly upon algarrobo trees brought down by mountain streams where the shifting of piedmont stream channels had under- mined algarrobales, that is patches of algarrobo woodland. One should not make the mistake of thinking that this means necessarily a change of climate. A shift in a piedmont stream might leave a long tongue of algarrobo forest without water and kill it off, floods of a later epoch burying the fallen trunks. The drifting of sand, the alleged increase of salt deposits, and possibly a change of climate have helped bring about the disappearance of the forests. 2 Frezier: Relation du voyage de la mer du sud aux cotes du Chily et du Perou fait pendant les annees 1712, 1713 et 1714, Paris, 1732, p. 131. 3 F. J. San Roman: Desierto i Cordilleras de Atacama, 2 vols., Santiago, 1896; refer- ence in Vol. I, p. 191. ^ A Plagemann: Der Chilesaltpeter, Berlin, 1904, p. 17. 5 G. E. Billinghurst: Estudio sobre la geografia de Tarapaca, Santiago, 1886, pp. 31-32. A DESERT JOURNEY 17 Fig. 4 ■4^- ¥"-(' .^-^'t^ i^-^.:^4 .*j«^,:^3'^^^«'^ *%&r ->«_-»r L ^zx'zt-^*^ SU0LJ. Fig. 5 Fig. 4 — Medanos, or sand dunes, marching eastward up the piedmont slopes on the western border of the Central Andes east of Pica (see Fig. i for location). They are formed and driven by the regular afternoon wind from the sea that gen- erally blows with gale strength. Fig. 5 — The so-called "desert pavement," the finer material being blown away leaving the coarser material as a protective covering. i8 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA It is certain that algarrobo played a great role in the food supply of the former inhabitants of the Desert of Atacama, as it did on the other side of the mountains. Fruits and many objects made of algarrobo wood were found by Eric Boman in the graves of Calama.^ Piedmont Oases For several miles In the piedmont stretch our trail crossed dry baked mud flats where the flood waters are impounded in shallow reservoirs according to the natural depressions of the ground. The tops of the blocks between the mud cracks are curled upward and break into thin flakes along the bedding planes as the mules' hoofs dislodge them. A strong wind had been blowing from the sea during the afternoon, and It had drifted sand from near-by sources over the mud-cracked sur- face, filling in the spaces between the cracks and the curled edges of the plates. It is by such means that the geologist, studying mud layers visible In the rocks formed In remote geo- logical ages, determines past climates and other conditions of formation in places that now may have plenty of moisture. Beyond this point we rode farther Into the piedmont and entered more broken country where we experienced great diffi- culty in keeping the trail, for each traveler had apparently taken his own route. From the summits of the ridges between the shallow valleys we could now look over the whole width of the nitrate pampa and see the low hills of the Coast Range out- lined against the dark haze, the top of the fog bank, that hangs over the edge of the Pacific. The desert trail where It crosses the solars appeared broad and white in contrast to the darker yellow and brown of the untraveled pampa and could be seen for a distance of at least fifteen miles. The bright yellow light of sunset gave place to purples that seemed almost to creep out of the mountains and the sky above them until we could see at first faintly and then more clearly the lights of the nitrate works at Alianza on the western border of the nitrate fields. There 6 Eric Boman: Antiquites de la Region Andine de la Republique Argentine et du Desert d'Atacama, 2 vols., Paris, 1908; reference in Vol. 2, pp. 713-714. A DESERT JOURNEY 19 was no moon, and the darkness came rapidly down to make the going still more difficult. At thesummitof every rise the guides would look about for the light at Matilla, and presently they located it. It is set up in a wooden tower to guide the night traveler, who would otherwise be lost in the maze of ravines. By three in the morning we reached the floor of the Quebrada de Quisma opposite Matilla, but in the darkness we could not find the ford, and, fearful of the river sands, the guides thought it best to make camp there. We set fire to a dry bush and by its light, as that of a huge torch, prepared a meal and staked out the mules. (For illustration of Matilla see Frontispiece.) The next morning we found the ford but a hundred yards away, crossed over to Matilla, and rode on to Pica where we spent the day. Here we obtained additional blankets, brought in regular trade from Bolivia by llama caravan, and added to our stock of provisions. The next day took us across the drifted sand tracts east of Pica (Fig. 4) and to the wells at Tambillo, the last outpost of the desert in the Andean foothills. Water Supply of the Oases The village of Matilla is supported by a thin thread of water that issues from the so-called mountains far above, the Altos de Pica. They are really a plateau and part of an even surface that extends for thirty or forty miles along the Andean crest. Halfway up their slopes one comes upon the edge of a belt of grass that denotes a rainfall slightly heavier and, of still more importance, regular in occurrence. It is a mid-mountain belt of annual rains and permanent pasture. Almost before we had time to note the first spears of grass at about 8000 feet we also noted the first bird calls we had heard since we left the coast with its bewildering millions of sea fowl. A little higher and we came to an old and now abandoned corral and camp site where the mountain shepherds from the eastern, or Bolivian, side of the Andes had camped in traveling down to the desert towns and ports or had pastured their llamas for a time. From out this zone of grassland several streams run to converge in the Quebrada de Quisma where Matilla lies. 20 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA At Pica, on the piedmont slope to one side of the stream courses, tunnels have been built into the piedmont deposits and carry the water by low gradients down to the intake of the pipes and canals that distribute it. We rode up to the intake of one of these (La Vertiente del Resbaladero) and saw the pool at the foot of cliffs partly encircling a cavelike opening. It was at that time the chief point of interest in the town. A similar system of water recovery has been built in the desert places of other countries. In Persia such a subterranean conduit is called kanat, in Baluchistan and in Turkestan kariz. In Tidi- kelt and other provinces of the Algerian Sahara it is called fog- gara, and all who have worked to increase its yield have a share in the flow. A recent account has been given of the pits and connecting galleries called retharas in Morocco.'^ A great water tunnel over a mile long has been built near a dry stream bed close to the Khojak Pass in India; and southern California has a number of like tunnels, some with "weep holes" where the water discharges into the main opening.^ The entire system of galleries or tunnels at Pica is one of great variety of structure and flow, and I know of no other town in South America that has so many of them or that depends so completely upon the artificial recovery of the ground water for both its drinking water and its irrigation. The galleries have been cut in a soft sandstone which is yet sufficiently hard to stand up under its own weight and to sup- port a roof of the same material. Only in certain places in a few galleries is a small amount of timbering or stonework nec- essary. Some are lighted for a part of their length and care- fully kept up, others are dark and interrupted here and there by falls of sand or soft rock from the roof or the somewhat overhanging upper walls. From the largest gallery, the Galeria Comifla, water is supplied at the rate of more than one and a half liters a second; but its earlier rate was four liters a second, the decrease being due to the failure of the owners to keep the floor clear and the intake sufficiently open. Some of the galler- ' Pierre Troussu: Les retharas de Marrakech, France-Maroc, Vol. 3, 1919, pp. 246- 249. 8 A. P. Davis and H. M. Wilson: Irrigation Engineering, 7th edit.. New York, 1919, p. 59. A DESERT JOURNEY 21 ies have become blocked, and the water collects in pools back of the obstructions. In all, there are at least fifteen principal galleries in the Pica region . They have a total length of 1 2 ,980 meters, or eight miles, the Galeria Comiiia alone being 2350 meters in length. The shortest is the Botijeria, 100 meters long. The total discharge of the fifteen principal galleries is 36.37 liters (9.5 gallons) a second. Besides the fifteen galleries, or tunnels, there are eight principal springs with a discharge of 118.98 liters (31.5 gallons) a second, or three times as great as the discharge from the artificial tunnels or galleries, though these have been produced at such great labor and expense. The galleries, or tunnels, have been built in part by the vil- lage of Pica, in part by private individuals for purposes of irrigation, and in part to supply water for the pipe lines that run to desert stations and to Iquique. Some of them have branches to augment the supply, some of them end in abrupt walls of earth from which the water oozes, others have an indefinite ending where the tunnel reaches a fault or penetrates a water-bearing stratum from which a supply of water is de- rived. Others still are terminated in a series of ascending slopes in order to furnish a larger area of "bleeding" surface to supply the main canal. ^ The supply of water from tunnels and springs is variable; but the supply from the springs is much more constant, for the feeding spaces in the subsoil are of natural origin. This is an important point to keep in mind in interpreting the diminished flow which is reported from many of the tunnels and which has led to the abandonment of some of the cultivated fields, or chacras, that they supply. Unlike most desert towns Pica stands in the midst of the desert without the green valley that elsewhere gives a natural basis for settlement. From its wells and springs and a reservoir in the course of a small stream descending from the piedmont the closely compacted gardens of the village are watered with scrupulous economy. We walked about the fruit orchards and irrigated patches of vegetables and grass, chatted w4th several ''J. Briiggen: Informe sobre el agua subterranea de la rejion de Pica, Pubis, del Servicio Jeol. No. 3, Minist. de Industrias i Obras Publicas, Santiago, 191 8. 22 DESERT TRAILS OF ATACAMA of the officials who called on us, and talked with a most intelli- gent schoolmaster from southern Chile. The town is but little disturbed by the government taxgatherers ; and in the worst years, as when the stream dwindles or the dam breaks and ruins both fields and crops, taxes are remitted altogether. The Cordilleran Slopes From each oasis on the desert border a trail climbs the cor- dilleran slopes. In places it follows the stream bed. In other places it runs along the flat interfluves or climbs perilously along the steep side of a deep ravine. In some cases two trails are in use, as in the case of the Quebrada de Tarapaca between Mocha and Sebaya, where the valley trail is impassable during the flood season when sudden deluges fill the narrow passage of the gorge. More commonly this duplication of trails is a fea- ture of the Eastern Cordillera, where heavy rains each year make it necessary to have a dry-weather and a wet-weather trail. The wet-weather trail follows high ground and has a roundabout and longer course and steep gradients. It might be called an emergency trail and in most cases is abandoned as soon as a road of any pretensions has been built with bridges or improved fords that enable the graded valley trail to be used practically the whole year round. I have spoken of the lower edge of the belt of grass that lies like a band across the western face of the mountains. It has also an upper edge where the short and nutritious grasses give way to the bunch grass, or ichu grass as it is called, and ground mosses and resinous shrubs such as the tola bush. The grass is in the temperate zone of the mountain flank; the mosses and resinous shrubs are in the alpine zone. High up on the plateau summits at 13,000 feet we were surprised to find the large and straight-stemmed cactus (cardSn) where there are nightly frosts for at least six weeks of the year during late May, June, and early July. This general type of cactus is known in our Southwest but cannot endure frost there. The belt of grass be- tween 8000 feet and 10,000 feet extends all the way from Peru, where I crossed it in 191 1 on the 73rd meridian, southward A DESERT JOURNEY 23 ^x.^ i'Jlitair- 43^' Fig. 6 tJS'.'ik. s%i&*^i'?i^lR^ Fig.